so far pretty good, most drawn characteristics are Xigui...leaves are huge with a minimum ku-se, comfortable to drink...but different from adrenalin-rushing DXS or fresh Bingdao of Lincang. And not crazed price range as Xigui or Bingdao, and will beat the quality of similar price range of DXS...looks like I'm alreay liking it

Evening pu: 2006 Feng Hua "Qi Cha" Yong De sheng from Lincang, almost the last of a small sample from Norbu. It's one of those samples that's so tasty it makes me wish I'd bought a beeng before they were gone--sweet, mellow, earthy. And it's creating a very nice scent on my little treebark puerh pot from Petr Novak--which is showing the same talent at that as the little pot I use for dark oolongs.

Yunnan sourcing 2013 spring Ai Lao. I did not even know I had this sample. A very nice surprise. The smell is a floral with some fruitiness and some black pepper aswell. The taste is very crisp and similar to the smell. There is some nice youthful qi as well as plenty of caffeine. not as thick as the wu Laing but for 23 dollar a cake it is a steal.

92 Xiaguan Shu fu Lu Xi brick. This was originally very poorly stored. I don't think this tea had seen a drop of humidity until I bought it. A few years ago when I bought this it was still a very brash and powerful tea and had a harshness from overly dry storage. In two years of moderate humidity the tea come back to life. I was afraid that the biological activity that causes Puerh to age was past the point of resesitation. But now it is much more mellow and well rounded if still very powerful and bursting with camphor. The soup color has gone from amber to mahogany. The scratchy feeling in the throat has been replaced by a residing flavor in the throat and hui gan. It has easily aged ten years in the past few into catching up in taste to its actual age.

That 92 brick is exactly why samples can be very misleading. A cake is a sample, a tong is a cake accurately describes the pitfalls of Western tendencies towards stamp collecting (getting one cake of this, a couple of tuos of that, etc, etc). Although nowadays, to get anything *good*, you pretty much have to be stamp collecting unless you're very well off.